Saturday, 13 July 2013

James Everington has a new collection of short stories out, Falling Over.

Regular readers will know already that I think that James is one of the best new writers out there. His first collection, The Other Room, was the most impressive debut I've read in years.

To mark the launch of Falling Over, James is writing a series of guest blogs about the inspirations and influences on the stories in the collection, and for my blog he's picked a story in Falling Over that I love.

So, over to James...

This blog should
be about Jack Finney's seminal novel The
Body Snatchers and its influence on a story of mine called Falling Over which starts with the
sentence:

Ever since Michelle has come
back from hospital, I’ve not been sure that it’s really her.

I'm sure the influence of Finney's novel seems obvious...

But, like the central character in Falling Over, I've never actually read The Body Snatchers (it's on my wish-list if anyone is feeling
generous?) although I have seen the film adaptations of it, the 70s version
being may favourite.

So instead, this blog is about the song Bodysnatchers by Radiohead and its influence on a story of mine
called... well you get the idea.

Yes, a song not a story. Can a song be an influence on
writing to the same extent as another piece of writing? It must surely be a
different type of influence: I've listened to Bodysnatchers far more times than I've read even my favourite
Ramsey Campbell short story and my reception of it is also coloured by the
other songs on the album, and other songs by Radiohead, interviews with I might
have read with the band, and all that jazz.

It's also coloured by the fact that I couldn't swear that
I've necessarily heard all the lyrics to the song correctly. Almost certainly
not, in fact, given how Thom Yorke sings. (I like the fact that the lyric site
I checked before writing this blog just says "incomprehensible" at
one point).

So to start: I'm reasonably certain that at one point Thom
Yorke sings the lines: I've no idea what
I am talking about/I'm trapped in this body and can't get out. And I
immediately think about times when I've felt like that, about times when I've
felt like an observer in my own body, listening to what I'm apparently saying
and thinking I don't believe a word of this!
Talking to a stranger maybe, and agreeing with views alien to me just to avoid
any conflict. Standing up in the office and giving a presentation full of
meaningless corporate speak and nodding my head sagely whilst others do the
same.

But what is this part of me behaving in such an odd way? It's
the grown up part of me, essentially. The part of me that knows you have to do
these things to get a job, to get along, to live. The bodysnatchers are, to me,
the compromises we have to make.

Has the light gone out
for you/Because the light's gone for me?/It is the 21st century... Typical
Radiohead lines, these, sounding both ultra-modern and apocalyptic. I wanted Falling Over to have a similar kind of
feel, to capture the feel that late capitalism might be collapsing in on itself
but so slowly we do nothing about it. It's not science-fiction as such, but I
wanted the world in the backgroundto be
just slightly furtherdown the road (or The Road) to environmental depletion
than the one around me. But society just carries on, coping with the inflated
petrol prices as best it can.

And it occurred to me that the compromises that seemed to
inform the idea of the bodysnatchers contained in those first line are exactly
the compromises that, on a macro scale, are causing such things. We're all in
effect watching the pod-people slowly dirty up our world, but the pod people
are us.

I've seen it coming
Thom Yorke shouts over and over at the end of the song. We can all see it
coming.

And yet, like people
not quite in control of our own bodies, we do nothing.

-------

Falling Over
is published by Infinity Plus and is out now. Ten stories of unease, fear and the weird.

"Good writing gives off fumes, the sort that induce dark visions, and
Everington’s elegant, sophisticated prose is a potent brew. Imbibe at your own
risk." - Robert Dunbar, author of The
Pines and Martyrs & Monsters.

Thursday, 2 May 2013

Time for a new interview, this time with the very talented Aliya Whiteley. I've enjoyed Aliya's work for a long time, not least because she's turned her hand to a lot of different kinds of stories and executed them all so well. I'm partway through reading her new collection, and it is one of the best things I have read so far this year, and may well stay that way. You should read it, I think you'll love it too. (Get here: Lulu)

I’m stuck in a lift
with Cher and you want me to talk books?! I’ll attempt to remain coherent. Witchcraft in the Harem is a collection
of fantasy short stories that take you to dangerous and exciting places.

Here’s the blurb:

You’re running away from something terrible. You think you’ve
escaped it, this thing, but it turns out it’s waiting for you in all the places
you hide: your house, your garden, a self-help group, a seraglio, the island of
Zanzibar, a museum in Turin, a hot air balloon in Canada, even in the ladies’
room of your favourite nightclub. You’ve carried it into these places with you.
It’s inside you. And now it’s time for it to come out.

I loved Gypsies,
Tramps and Thieves, by the way. Will you sign my face please?

Uh-oh. Not sure lifts are meant to stop
suddenly between floors like this. Guess we've got a bit more time. Ignore the
flickering lights and creaking sounds above us. Would you like to tell me about
other books or stories that you have available?

Before I wrote
fantasy stories I wrote comic novels. Three
Things About Me and Light Reading
are still out there for public perusal. And I have the true-life story of the
time I fled my wedding (and took my fiancé along with me) available in the
bestselling Lonely Planet anthology Better
Than Fiction. None of these are as
monumental as If I Could Turn Back Time,
obviously, but one does one’s best.

Please stop repeatedly pressing the emergency
button. The comment about building a ladder of bones to reach the ceiling hatch
and get out of here was just blue-skies thinking. So, what are you working on
now?

I’ve just finished writing a fantasy novel and I’ve got short
stories coming up in magazines like Kaleidotrope
and Per Contra, as well in the Best of Smokelong anthology, so these
are exciting times for me. Please don’t make a ladder out of me. I have so much
to live for.

You've told us about what stories you've
written, and I know from my own reading how wide-ranging they are. How would
you describe yourself as a writer?

I really don’t do just one genre or type of story. I write the
ideas that come to me. I’ve always loved fantasy, but as a loose definition for
stories in which anything could happen. I’d describe myself as unpredictable.

Pascal said: "Please forgive this very
long and drawn out letter, I did not have time to write you a short one."
Do you find writing short fiction harder than your novels?

The challenge of the novel is to keep going every day, and maybe
find at the end of the writing process that you’ve wasted a year. I can’t tell
early on in a novel if I’m wasting my time, so in that regard a short story is
easier to write. Plus my mind works in short. I’m not a person that writes five
thousand words and cuts down to two. I write one thousand words and work up. I
often find with novels that the scenes I add late on in the editing process
become the key moments, which is strange. But my brain works that way.

In your own writing, what do you think you do
well, and what do you wish you could do better?

I think I can
surprise the reader well. I love those moments when you’re reading a book or a
story and you think to yourself – I have no idea where this is going. I love
those moments, and I try to get that feeling into my writing. It’s very
powerful.

Right now I’m working
on a novel from a male point of view, and I’m wishing I was naturally better at
that. I’m persevering, though.

Can you remember what made you sit down to
write your first book or story?

Compulsory
redundancy. I was an assistant at an insurance company and when they decided to
close the office they needed someone to stay behind for three months and sit
there with not a lot to do until all the furniture had been moved out. So I
filled my time by writing. I wrote a really awful romantic novel, just to see
if I could. And I could. That gave me the confidence to try to write something
literary, and I wrote my King Lear/Dune crossover novella, Mean Mode Median. And I loved it – that feeling of creation and
freedom.

Do you have a book or short story that you're
very fond of, but you think should get more attention from the world than it
has?

I wrote a novel a few
years ago called The Flipside of Libby
Frost and it is an Acker Bilk inspired weirdness of a novel that I’m very
proud of. But it fell in that period when conventional publishing wanted me to
write something a bit more commercial and so it never got published. Maybe
someday it’ll make it out of the hard drive and into the real world.

Print publishing is a doomed but still
predatory dinosaur rotting from the feet up. Ebook publishing is the vomiting
out of the world's slushpiles onto the market. In the ongoing war of words and
hyperbole, where's the happy medium to be found? Where do you think the
publishing business is heading over the next few years, and what are you doing
to be ready for it?

I really don’t know
and I’m rubbish at predicting things. My experiences with larger publishers and
the business model of publishing has taught me that I can’t do anything about
it. I want to get my work out there and beyond that I am unbothered about the
medium. I’ve done big publishing, small press, and self-publishing, and they
all have something to recommend them. No matter how I get published, the only
thing under my control is putting my best work out there so that I’m not
ashamed of it. So that’s what I concentrate on.

What book do you most wish that you had written?

Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation. Anything by
Rupert Thomson, actually, because he’s brilliant. Or The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.

If you could give an aspiring writer one piece
of advice, what would it be?

You only start to get
good at it if you do it lots and do it for years.

If you could tell an aspiring piece of writer
to ignore one commonly given piece of advice, what would it be?

Any reductive piece
of advice annoys me. Don’t use adverbs, don’t use tags other than ‘said’, and
so on. You get a feel for what fits after a while, and sometimes it’s an adverb
or a different speech tag. She opined grandiosely.

Are you 'out' as a writer of fiction with work
colleagues/family, and if so, what reaction did you get?

I was a full-time stay-home mother, but then my daughter
ungraciously went off to school, so I had to come clean and admit I had also
been writing for the past five years and wasn’t about to go out and get another
office job.

It’s difficult to hide because I like writing in cafes. In fact,
I choose one café that I love and I go there every morning, and so it would
look odd to say I’m merely doodling when I’m obviously scribbling long
sentences for two hours at a time. So I tell people I’m a writer, and they
think I’m strange or deluded, and that’s fine. They’re always really pleased
for me, though. Pleased that I’m happily scribbling away.

Gibbons or tigers?

I just wrote a short story
about tigers that live in your brain, so tigers it is.

Thursday, 28 March 2013

Am not writing much in the way of short fiction these days (it's all novel novel novel and will be for the foreseeable), but the new issue of Supernatural Tales includes a story from me, a story from the excellent James Everington, and five other great stories. Full contents:

Sunday, 24 March 2013

100km from Newcastle up into the hills of Northumberland and back again. Looks like there is the occasional hill, but we're not going into the Cheviots. Plan is that after not too long we will be going much further than this, but it seems a good start.

Unlike training, which has been not happening this windswept weekend. When a whole bunch of lampposts are being blown over along our usual loop, that's nature's way of telling you it's not the brightest idea to be out on the bike.

So, for these prolonged wintry moments, we bought a turbo trainer today. If you don't know what that is, it's kind of a mix of these.